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An anonymous reader writes "Hot on the heels of Google's spin-off company Calico, another major contender has emerged in the race to develop technologies for extending healthy human lifespan. Dr Craig Venter, who was first to map the entire human genetic code and the first to engineer a synthetic lifeform, has teamed up with founder of the X-Prize, Dr Peter Diamandis, to create Human Longevity Inc. 'Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease,' said Dr. Venter. 'Using the combined power of our core areas of expertise—genomics, informatics, and stem cell therapies, we are tackling one of the greatest medical/scientific and societal challenges — aging and aging related diseases,' said Dr. Venter. 'Between 1910 and 2010 improvements in medicine and sanitation increased the human lifespan by 50 percent from 50 to 75 years.....our goal is to make 100-years-old the new 60,' said Diamandis."

If the motivation required to get funding for this research is that it will allow corporations to keep their employees (read: investment in training, knowledge base, experience and whatever) longer, then I don't fucking care: sign me up for that biological immortality, motherfuckers!

It seems absolutely silly to avoid this area of research.

What the hell is point of medicine if not to extend life, anyway? Clearly it would be more cost effective to do something about that "number one risk factor" for all those expensive chronic / terminal diseases. And who wouldn't want to be healthier and live longer?

Sure you get a lot of loudmouths who speak before they think blurbing about Malthusian crises, ancient Greek mythology (psh...) and religious baloney about "God's plan", but if there were a pill that could guarantee you the ability to live to the age of three hundred, you couldn't manufacture them fast enough.

Funny how that just happens to be around the average current lifespan at this point in time. I wonder, if you had lived in 1910, would your figure have been only 50 years(the average lifespan at that time)?

Death and the disabilities of aging are so horrible that people attempt to rationalize it away by being "content" with whatever they think they can confidently expect in the way of lifespan. It is "sour grapes" of the highest order. Then, when the possibility of a longer lifespan comes along(thanks to Google or whoever), they find it disrupting and destabilizing to their rationalization, and unfortunately this sometimes lead to just a tighter grasping to the rationalization.

Thanks to science and medicine you may live much longer than 70 to 80 years, I say embrace it.

Hate to break it to you, but dying is objectively bad. There are zero upsides to it that we can prove beyond any doubt, and there are innumerable downsides which I'm sure everyone can easily imagine for themselves. There is nothing wrong with objective fear, it's not a problem to be solved.

Thank you. I'm always confused by the idiots in threads like this that immediately start talking about how horrible it would be, with an extra forty or fifty years of suffering. That's not how it works! You're suffering and miserable at the end of your life because there's a bunch of stuff killing you.

I generally consider Aubrey de Grey a quack, and hate that he's the face of the longevity movement (I suspect it's just the mind-blowing beard). But there is one thing he said that I really like. To paraphrase, if you ask people if they want an extra forty years of life, a lot will say no. If you ask instead if they want to keep the body of a thirty year old until they're eighty, with the consequence that they live an extra forty years, they almost all say yes.